The biggest challenge in talking to cyclist Mackenzie Myatt about the U.S. national road race championship she won earlier this month is that she’d rather puncture a tire than brag about herself.
Home in East Petpeswick for a week in between road racing in Colorado and World Cup mountain bike races in Germany and the Czech Republic, Myatt tried to convince a visitor that she won an 80-kilometre race mainly because “a lot of things went right for me.” Also, that she is somehow impervious to the effects of high altitude while competing in an endurance competition.
“I knew the course from last year, it’s a climber’s course, it’s at altitude — about 2,000 metres I think — and I didn’t feel the altitude at all, I felt great. It sort of depends on the person, how you react to altitude,” she said in her parents’ living room, which she had temporarily decorated with dumbbells and a yoga mat. “It wasn’t as high as I’ve raced before. The thing with altitude is, you can arrive two weeks early and try to adjust to it, or you can arrive right before you have to race and it won’t hit you yet. So I arrived the day before the road race.”
Myatt, 20, represents the Savannah College of Art and Design, and goes to school on an athletic scholarship. SCAD was the only school that recruited her, which seems to be working out quite well for the coach there, since Myatt also won the national championship in mountain biking last fall.
Before the call from a Georgia area code while Myatt was in Grade 12 at Eastern Shore District High, the Atlanta school was not on her radar.
“I wasn’t thinking about going to school in the States at all,” she said. “I was going to go to Dal or SMU or Acadia and study psychology.”
Getting back in modesty mode, Myatt said another lucky thing for her about the Grand Junction, Colo., road course was that the last kilometre was a steep climb.
“If it was a downhill or a flat finish I’m sure the result would have been much different,” she said. “The race was, oddly, slower than it could have been so I actually felt pretty rested going into the finish so I had a lot of energy. . . and my teammate pulled me to the front of the group, pushed the pace. Then her calf cramped so she couldn’t pull me any further, so she turned around and she goes ‘Mackenzie, go!’ and I was like ‘Oh my gosh, I guess I have to attack now, I guess this is the moment,’ so I sprinted.”
Last year, in her first season as a collegian, Myatt was second at the national championship, which is administered by USA Cycling, rather than the NCAA.
“Some of the girls were really
excited after the road race, some other teams came up to me and were super, super happy, congratulating me on the race. There wasn’t anyone (visibly) unhappy, I’m sure some of the teams were taken aback, because theoretically they should win: They had more girls, more experience, they’re faster,” Myatt said of the mass start race, for which most schools had teams of six. “We had five, but three of the girls were sort of just trying to stay in the race, and I had one teammate I planned to work together with, because she’s strong enough to help me and she did, a lot.”
Mackenzie’s dad Simon, himself a cyclist, first put her on a bike at the age of four or five. It wasn’t a perfect beginning.
“I do have a memory of being really, really small and my dad going to ESDH, just around the corner,” she said. “One of the things you do with kids is take the pedals off so they learn how to balance, so there were no pedals and he just sort of pushed me and let me go, and I just went and it was terrifying. I remember being so mad because he let me go.”
Soon she was competing in short-track races in the north end of Halifax, put on by Cyclesmith, now her main sponsor.
She’s represented Nova Scotia twice at the Canada Games, winning a mountain
bike silver medal in 2017. Mountain and road biking are far from identical, so for the same athlete to win a national championship in both in the same season is a remarkable achievement.
“A lot of people can do well at both but usually specialize and pick one or the other, but there are still a good amount of professional mountain bikers who also race on road teams. The biggest reason people don’t generally do it is because when you add up the two race seasons in a year, it’s too much to be racing almost all year round,” Myatt said. “After road nationals last year, I was like ‘Hey, I was second, maybe I can win this thing.’ But mountain bike was the one that was really important, the one I was excited about, that I really wanted to win.”
“I think, and I’ve been told, that I could make a career as a road cyclist. But I just find mountain biking so much more fun.”
Myatt is finishing up her second year of a four-year program at SCAD, where she is studying creative writing (her mother is a former journalist).
“I’ve always loved writing, loved reading books, novels, always sort of fantasized about writing a novel,” she said. “I write poetry a lot, actually, so one day publishing a book of poetry is on my mind.”
From January to March, Myatt was in Atlanta, but since then her schedule of training in the Canadiannational program, plus a Canada Cup race, U.S.
Cup races, and the collegiate nationals, she has been basically living on the road. The frantic pace of travel will continue all summer; luckily, sponsors make it almost affordable.
“What costs the most are plane tickets, because I’ve been finding pretty reasonable accommodations wherever I go and there’s support from people in the cycling community when I travel to races,” she said. “I do get provincial funding from Bicycle Nova Scotia, I get funding from Support for Sport, and when I qualify for national team projects there is automatic funding that helps with that.”
There’s nothing, Myatt says, she’d rather do than have an Olympic medal slipped around her neck, even write a best-selling novel (she had to think about that for a minute). At her age, time is on her side, which works out because Canada has a few very strong mountain bikers ahead of her.
“Eight years could be feasible,” she said. “I’ve been told I should move that to four because a lot can happen in four years, and that’s true. But there are only two female Olympic mountain biking spots. The top two are still going and the third, Haley Smith, just got bronze at the Commonwealth Games and she’s just getting faster and faster. The best Canadian mountain bikers are the best in the world.”
